lhasa

the free LHA / LZH / PMarc decoder, distributed as a single self-contained static binary.

lhasa is vendored from fragglet/lhasa — an ISC-licensed library + CLI by Simon Howard. We don't maintain the decoder; we just ship it as a zero-dependency static binary for every major platform.

Install on macOS / Linux / Windows See the four commands

~200 KB static binary · zero libc / zlib / libiconv on any Linux, macOS, or Windows.

Latest release · upstream · Security audit · Supported formats · Usage · Install · Build audit

TL;DR. lhasa is the de-facto free reimplementation of the lha CLI — reads .lzh (LHA), .lzs (LArc), and .pma (PMarc) archives without the non-free redistribution baggage of historical lha. Upstream is fragglet/lhasa (ISC, by Simon Howard); this repo (ljh-sh/lhasa) adds multi-arch static-binary releases. The CLI binary is intentionally named lha (not lhasa) so legacy scripts invoking lha x foo.lzh keep working. Who should care: anyone unpacking a 30-year-old .lzh on a system without a 1990s archiver; CI pipelines that want a single 200-KB static binary with no libz / libiconv / libcurl drag-in; people who need liblhasa for C embedding (header + .pc file). What this site is: an install guide (x eget / apt / brew / source build), a usage primer covering the four common commands (l / x / t / p), a format catalogue for the .lzh / .lzs / .pma families, a source-level security audit of the vendored decoder, and a build audit covering the CI matrix, SHA256SUMS, and reproducibility. What this site is not: an encoder; an lzh-format extension; a rewritten-from-scratch lhasa-rs.

What is lhasa?

Lhasa is an ISC-licensed library + CLI for reading .lzh (LHA) and .lzs / .pma archives. It is intentionally decoder-only — creating .lzh archives remains the job of the original (non-free) lha binary built from upstream jca02266/lha.

lhasa (the library, liblhasa) is embeddable in C applications: file managers add it for LZH preview; CDNs and archives use it to surface .lzh content on demand. The CLI binary lhasa ships is named lha — the project deliberately mirrors the original LHa for UNIX command so legacy toolchains that call lha x archive.lzh keep working transparently.

Usage. Four commands — list, extract, test, print:

  lha l archive.lzh             # list (ls)
  lha x archive.lzh             # extract
  lha t archive.lzh             # test (CRC verify)
  lha p archive.lzh file        # print (cat) to stdout

install: x eget ljh-sh/lhasa · static binary, ~200 KB, zero deps.

Why lhasa exists (one paragraph)

jca02266/lha (the maintained LHa for UNIX 1.14i tree) carries a custom redistribution license in its man page — it permits source redistribution with attribution but requires contacting the original maintainers before binary-only redistribution. For most of the 1990s this wasn't a problem because Linux distributions shipped the binary directly. After Debian phased the package out of non-free in 2012 in favor of a FOSS decoder, fragglet/lhasa (started 2011 by Simon Howard, ISC) became the standard FOSS replacement. lhasa reads every variant the original lha writes (lh0..lh7, lhx, lzs, pma) but cannot create new .lzh archives — that remains a job for the original lha source build.

ljh-sh/lhasa takes the ISC source and ships it as a single static binary for platforms where upstream fragglet/lhasa only publishes source tarballs + Windows prebuilts — i.e. for Linux and macOS users who want a one-line install without a build step.